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DTI LAUDS US GSP EXPANSION COVERING PH TRAVEL GOODS

Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Secretary Ramon Lopez welcomed the approval of the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to include Philippine travel goods in its expanded General System of Preferences (GSP) scheme.

Effective 1 July 2017, all US GSP Beneficiary Developing Countries will enjoy duty-free treatment for a number of its travel goods exports to the US. The new GSP program included 23 tariff lines, allowing travel goods such as apparels, bags, wallets and backpacks, luggage, and sport and travel bags made in the Philippines to enter the US market duty-free.

Sec. Lopez pushed for the Philippine advocacy of GSP inclusion and had consistently taken this up with counterparts from the USTR.

“This expansion will boost the local manufacturing industry and eventually provide more employment opportunities for Filipinos, creating 70,000 new jobs and increasing our GDP to 0.5 percent,” he said.Read more.

PH CITES BENEFITS OF WTO INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AGREEMENT

The Philippines, through Department of Trade and Industry’s Board of Investments (BOI) Governor Lucita Reyes, Semiconductor and Electronics Industries in the Philippines (SEIPI) President Danilo Lachica and Ionics Vice-President for Operations Mr. Jay Chavez, recently participated at the celebration of World Trade Organization’s 20th Information Technology Agreement (ITA) Symposium held on 27-28 June in Geneva, Switzerland.

According to Magnolia Uy, DTI Philippine Trade and Investment Center in Geneva (PTIC-Geneva), the event allowed for the member countries to highlight ITA’s role of providing households and domestic businesses access to more affordable and higher-quality Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) through tariffs elimination on hundreds of ICT products.

The Philippines, as one of the 82 signatories of ITA, has benefited from the initial ITA signed in 1996 and its expansion of list in 2015. According to the Philippines’ chief ITA negotiator and Board of Investment Governor Lucita Reyes, the country’s ITA membership helped lower prices for key ICT hardware inputs that the BPO industry depends upon. At present, the country’s ICT services exports account for roughly 70% of total services exports while the ICT goods exports account for more than 35% of total exported goods.Read more.